Attack of the Bladeless Wind Turbines!

Well, here it is, folks, the future of wind turbines. Yup, no blades, so the spotted owls and birdies will be safe to fly around them. And, you can put a couple of these in the same space as a regular whirling & spinning wind turbine. It's a no-brainer. The future is here and now. Well, almost.

We've all grown accustomed to seeing those 100-foot pinwheels that are popping up everywhere there's wind to generate electricity. They spin in the breezes as you drive down the highway, spinning and chopping up endangered birdies and whatever else happens to fly through them into tiny pieces to make pretty much a bloody mess on the ground below. 

But guess what? Now somebody has a better idea. A Spanish company by the name of Vortex Bladeless has figured out a way to generate electricity from the power of the winds in a radical new way. In a few years you just might be seeing a bunch of these gizmos on the horizon instead of blades up in the sky and, apparently, yes, they actually do produce electricity.

Of course, the things look like giant rolled marijuana joints shooting up into the sky, but what the hey. These things are supposed to do the same as the windmills but instead they turn the breezes into kinetic energy by the miracle of "vorticity".

Instead of capturing energy from the winds by a giant propeller, vorticity is an aerodynamic effect of spinning vortices that's long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers who normally try to figure out how to design their buildings so these whirlpools of wind don't rip them apart. Apparently, vorticity can start an oscillating motion in structures (if the wind is strong enough) and things will break apart and collapse. That's not such a good thing if you're making a building, but apparently if you use the energy and funnel it the right way, you can make it wobble around and produce electricity.

That's what the founders of Vortex Bladeless think. They take that energy and try to use it instead of avoiding it by turning it into something productive.

The idea of Vortex’s shape came about by using computers to make sure the spinning wind occurs all together at the right times and places along the entire gigantic joint, er, mast. In the current prototype, the elongated cone, mast, joint, or whatever it is, is made of carbon fiber and fiberglass which lets it vibrate even more normal. Then there are some repelling magnets at the bottom that jerk each other back and forth and all that kinetic energy is then converted into electricity. Really!

What a great idea! No gears or bolts or anything mechanical moving around. That makes it cheaper to manufacture and maintain. The guys who put the company together say the "Vortex Mini" will be about 41 feet tall and can capture about 40 percent of the same wind that a regular windmill would, but since you can put twice as many of these in the space of a propeller turbine, it works out pretty close to the same thing.

The company already has about $1 million raised from the Spanish government and from private capital and they're planning to try raising more funds in the U.S. soon.

Next, I'll bet they'll be painting the things so they even look more like giant smoking marijuana joints and sell advertising on them to the pot industries in Colorado where it's legal. Oh my! What would our parents think?

New Ban on Chinese Funeral Strippers 

A rather odd custom seems to have emerged in China during the latter part of the 20th Century that the Chinese government has now decided to completely ban. It seems that when people die and their families wanted to make sure there are plenty of mourners at the funeral to show that the person had been well known and respected by the masses, strippers were hired to sing and dance and remove their clothing. Some of the strippers even performed with snakes in order to attract larger crowds to the deceased’s funeral. This brought a lot of people to the services. A lot. And it made the guy look like he had been extremely popular, and loved by everyone, so of course this made the families happy in their grief. 

According to Chinese custom, a large crowd at a funeral would also be a harbinger that good fortune would come to the deceased in his afterlife. “It’s to give them face,” according to one villager, “otherwise almost no one would come to the funeral."

The practice might seem a bit strange to you and me, but apparently it made sense to the Chinese, and stripper performances became rather commonplace, at least until the mid 1980's when the government passed laws against full nudity in public. Even so, the practice continued to occur regularly with professional singing and dancing groups over the next few decades until last Thursday when the Chinese Ministry of Culture told police to crack down on the performances.

Pictures that were taken last month during a funeral in the city of Handan were widely circulated over the Internet showing a dancer removing her bra in front of parents and children of the recently deceased. A spokesperson for The Ministry of Culture also cited “obscene” performances in Jiangsu, another Chinese province, and warned the public that there would be a crackdown on these "lascivious last rites."

In the Handan incident, the Red Rose Song and Dance Troupe performed a strip-tease after the funeral. The group took off their clothes after performing a traditional song-and-dance routine, the ministry said. Six of the performers were cited for violating public security regulations. The group's manager, surnamed Li, was jailed for 15 days and fined 70,000 yuan (over $11,000) by authorities for "corrupting the social atmosphere."

Ah, it seems this healthy and, er, unnatural tradition may be coming to a close. What a shame. I wonder if the deceased will miss the attention. Maybe not?